Southern trees bear strange fruit,
The street in bare scars, open from bullwhips
broken in a million pieces they wear like riches
on dusty finger tips while the winter spits their tar;
across coughing shivers of naked children
the echoes fell below the lonely reverberation
created by the stutter of a mothers neck breaking
-just before her eyes formed a basin
for her only son to huddle in it's basement:
with her pupils still shaking-
she was ripe for the taking.
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Blood weaves away a fork tongued leaf,
raised on the lungs from one tree of snakes
-dangling rotten rinds by the plot of white scars
the coughs hung in the blind clot of a night's heart
that wore like poor cuffs on a short spun sleeve,
the tree called bark-
as the last full leafs fall along the rattle snakes,
and the eve is raped as she kicks those feet
-a final give all to stall the bite marks
from a heart of broken teeth.
The dim old rooms bloom a thorn chest surface
with a surgeons thimble glued to the symbols muse
-they've plucked the dust and stripped the fruits
that bled justice on a gutless tread of filth full boots
that sipped the juices yet suggest it's worthless
-as the burning smiles perch when the serpents
twist the last full apple stems into a noose.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
As the vines slip their lips around a single smile
the teeth split on bloody gums from the window while
the seeds drip from simple eyes
of symbol chimes and bulging cries from rusty guns,
fired into the blue as the clouds crash down from the sky
and land beside the nimble roots
to plant a tree of blood and sage to place the fruits
that pass as strange in the bloom of neon logs
and a lonely whittled noose
that grows off the tree planted at the feet standing
beside the bleeding man without a single sigh.
The empty smiles corrode below the soldier
of endings where miles of roads burn
in crop circle, under the vultures dropped machete-
at the levy's clot tossing piles of sober
for the sun to sip up and spit like confetti,
among a field of steel and five thumbed clovers
-peeling rusted land mines and blindfolds over
swollen eyelids, the sky readies
for crying.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
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